A/N: Ahaha! We are getting into it now! Shana got this done in the middle of a massive workload, so worship her! And I find it much easier to write when stuff is actually happening, so booyah, I'm back, bitches!
My goodness, I am sorry for that language. Proceed!
I own nothing but the obvious.
The following weeks would prove exactly one thing, the somehow interminably long stretch of days sending just that one message:
Raiku hated being right.
Well, no. It wasn't like she could really tell, given how rarely it happened, but evidence suggested it so far!
…With a recorded occurrence of one.
Okay, so maybe she just didn't like it this time. She had to think of a better way of labeling things, just for her own internal consistency.
She had been right and, perhaps coincidentally, she was really not liking the circumstances. Better!
...Also it had only been a week and a bit. Two, more like, but it hadn't been that long.
In related news, it was rapidly becoming clear that "simple" was shinobi code for "unbearably tedious". The criminals had either retired or moved on or possibly gradually mummified from inactivity; it could have been anything, really, but whatever it was, it was inconsiderate.
God.
Raiku flopped back onto the tiles of the inn's roof and sighed heavily.
All she wanted to do was murder these people. The most she'd expected to wait was for Yamada to possibly question them, but this? Was a little courtesy too much to ask? What were they, murder-shy?
She shifted in place, terracotta sticking uncomfortably into a shoulder blade. And it was hot. It was weirdly hot for such overcast weather. The whole place was just drowning in humidity that made Raiku occasionally twitch and electrocute something by accident, just from sheer build-up. She'd had the gall to ask Ryuu to do something about it two days into the fruitless searching, and he'd not only refused, but had launched into a somehow blistering lecture on meteorological phenomena and the complexities thereof that had made Raiku's eyes glaze over.
Enduring the following predictably muggy days had been worth not having to hear the lecture twice, but only just.
'Hey Raiku!'
Raiku didn't bother lifting her head, sweat-damp hair sticking to the tiles already. 'Hey Tadano.' There was the distinct rumbling of wheels on paving stones. He was wheeling supplies inside from his mid-afternoon grocery run. Every day he would go and get it, grab some tea with his sister, wheel the food back inside and make sure the shinobi on the roof was still alive and hadn't dehydrated to death.
This was what it had come to. She was part of a civilian's routine.
Raiku sighed again. This couldn't go on. She was a Chuunin. She had killed people. They'd been sweeping the area in increasingly wide patrol circles and there was no sign of anyone and she was stuck at home base because apparently starting a forest fire wouldn't be helpful here.
Which, hello, it was certainly one way to solve the problem. But there weren't even any Plots for her to angst over! Her Brooding quota was already met, she had no one to talk to, and the Genematrix didn't even have the decency to have something lurking around for her to avoid.
Raiku wondered idly if she should buy sunglasses. Wasn't UV damage supposed to be higher on cloudy days? And she was spending a lot of time on the roof and no, she wasn't pining for her teammates, Daisukenojo. She'd tried to buy a little handheld fan and it had, predictably, suffered a tragic death very quickly, but sunglasses should be safe, right?
…Well no, her common sense, the Gairano part of the brain pointed out. They were made of plastic. She was lucky enough to just go through clothes fast, the last thing she needed was sunglasses permanently fused to her skin and severe burns to go with her snazzy new eyewear. She'd just have to put up with the heat and humidity and hope that Ryuu finally snapped and mustered up some wind before she slowly sweated to death.
She pulled at her shirt and tried to fan some cooler air under her mask.
The clouds above weren't moving. They were just sitting there, not even having the decency to make shapes for her to attach needlessly sentimental meaning to. She couldn't even reminisce with such drab scenery and that was so many levels of unfair. Iji was actually very picturesque, after all, all hills and ivy and old stone roads and the least she could do was attach some nostalgia to it for later fond remembrance moments, but no.
Nope.
Raiku was starting to get the sneaking suspicion that the flipside of Gairano getting to live boring lives was being bored all the time if they were shinobi and so not allowed to take opportunities to just have exciting social lives. Most Gairano could spice up their lives as long as it was Drama free, but shinobi were under much stricter limitations. It was an unwelcome thought, so she promptly pushed it away and sat up.
Something had to be done.
She looked around guiltily, certain her dad would show up out of nowhere and catch her getting fired up. When he failed to materialize and criticize her lack of passivity, she relaxed a little, but the damage had already been done. She knew better. She couldn't go causing trouble. She had to lie low. They would find the surprisingly elusive criminals eventually, and only free-will-deficient weaklings had to rely on some… omnipotent narrative causality matrix.
She groaned and let herself fall backwards again, fanning herself.
And wasn't that just a little unfair? Plus, Ryuu and Daisuke hated the slow lack of progress too, getting crankier each time they came back for the day. They also were openly irritated that she wasn't allowed to help at that stage, getting what they saw as the easy job.
Which was totally inaccurate, since Raiku was hyperactive at best and a psychotic lightning ferret at worst. Boredom was, while usually glorious, not exactly something she came to naturally.
Raiku huffed, glaring at the still, overcast sky.
This was going to be so good for her. She was going to adjust and it was character-building instead of Character-building which meant it was going to be difficult and irritating.
Speaking of.
'Hey! You lazy shit, when we asked you to keep watch, you were supposed to keep watch!' Raiku twitched, her tetchy teammate's voice an unwelcome call back to the real world. Bad moods again. Perfect.
Though, she thought, snickering because she was secretly hilarious; who could tell the difference?
She'd been right. She'd also been assigned the last shower, which was less awful, since they rarely smelled good without one and she'd just ruin the tank anyway.
Besides, the joke was on them, Raiku knew, smiling so widely that it hurt. It was on them because the kitchen was all hers. Ryuu would be lurking outside the bathroom, towel slung over one lea—
She forcefully stopped herself, jabbing her chopstick into the back of her hand so that the pain would reinforce the message about things that were not okay to notice.
Ryuu. Would be lurking outside the bathroom, towel slung over one… lackadaisically slouched shoulder, tapping his foot and timing how long Daisukenojo took. Daisuke would be taking deliberately more than the agreed-upon eight minutes because Ryuu was the one who'd set the terms and all the while, she would be eating her way through the food the inn had prepared for the first round of dinner.
Sometimes her genius was frightening.
'So you didn't find anything?' she asked, looking up from where she had instinctively hunched over her food to protect it from predators.
Yamada let out a jaw-cracking yawn. "Nah. Nothing to find. Bastards are laying low."
'Maybe I could go next time!' she suggested, trying for casual and ending up with startled, somehow. 'I can do it faster!'
Yamada raised his non-existent eyebrows. "Yeah, and then when this part of the country goes up in flames, I can report it as a success. Get me?"
He had to learn how to let things go. 'One time. One time—,'
"Besides," he continued, grabbing his chopsticks now that Raiku had swept through the shared dishes like a typhoon and resources were getting scarce, "I've got another job for you to do. On your own, get me?"
Raiku froze, mouth full of noodles.
"I want you to look around."
Raiku waited for the catch, and eventually swallowed when she didn't think he was about to try and make her choke with indignation. 'That's all?' she managed.
Yamada looked at her evenly. She stared back, totally baffled. 'Is… is that not what I was doing?' she asked, slowly.
He sighed, tapping his chopsticks together in one hand, like he was wishing for a crab claw to crush her windpipe with. "Let's try this again, Speedy."
He leant forward.
"You should look around, get me?" he said meaningfully, making terrifyingly intense eye contact.
'Oh. Oh, yes, I get you,' Raiku lied, thoughts scrambling to find an answer in the disorganized filing cabinet she dared to call her brain.
Oh, she knew, did she?
Raiku squinted as Yamada turned his attention to the food of his that she'd been thoughtlessly sliding away from him and towards herself, staking a tiny coup against her surprisingly strong grip.
So there was this rumour, her mind produced reluctantly while that low-key culinary battle went on, that Gairano could sometimes find people.
But wait. Wait wait wait. They could only find Plot relevant people, and there were no such people there, Raiku pointed out, countering her own thought.
…But Yamada didn't know that, so he'd be expecting her to try. It was an irritable, critically aware thought, distinctly Gairano flavored. She was having a much easier time keeping track, nowadays, but that one stuck out.
She leant back in her chair, letting her head fall back and Yamada finally have his meal unassailed. Great. She'd have to scrounge fruitlessly around the village, getting stared at and profoundly lost in little high-walled, twisting streets, and they'd eventually find her mummified and emaciated body in an alley. Yamada would be disappointed at her corpse and the sheer power of it would haunt her in the afterlife.
God, shinobi life was glamorous.
'Where the hell is the food?' Daisuke complained, throwing himself into the chair across from her, red hair damp and the rest of him smelling oddly of violets.
Raiku valiantly managed to resist looking guiltily down at the empty dishes stacked in front of her. '…There was. An. It…' she faltered, never breaking wide, beseeching eye contact. '…It attacked me.'
Daisuke narrowed his eyes, looking more threatening than a floral-scented man had any right to look. 'Oh you son of a bitch.'
"Speedy's done anyway," Yamada said, quickly snatching the last pickled radish. "She's got things to do."
'I do?' Raiku asked uncertainly.
Yamada slowly looked up from his food, and his expression spoke volumes. I cannot possibly be expected, it began, to put up with the likes of, it continued, and Raiku decided to be true to herself and skip over the difficult parts.
'I do!' she said brightly. 'And it isn't secret! I just.'
What.
'Why do I just say everything that I think?!' she hissed to herself, gripping her hair like she could pull her uncooperative brain cells out with it. Being alone for days on end was making her already stunted social filters atrophy. This was a disaster.
Daisukenojo laughed, surprisingly amused rather than enraged. 'Wow. Just. That was pretty bad. You are the worst liar I have ever seen. Is this that Gairano thing? You giving that a try?'
'What?! No!' Raiku squawked. 'It's not that! I don't even know what that is!'
He snorted. 'My mother's a medic. I hear everything.'
What.
"Now that this moron has told the whole room," Yamada said, giving the evil eye to the only other person present, a civilian who looked like he'd rather be giving himself an amateur lobotomy than sitting near the enormous man, "you can get on with it."
'What, alone? You're just sending me off, a seventeen year old girl, in the dead of night—'
'Six-thirty, toaster, it's barely past sunset yet—'
'—in the utter darkness in a strange village when there are rampaging murderers around that we can't find—'
"You wanna take Sullen?" Yamada asked, voice deceptively pleasant.
Raiku froze.
'"Strange village?"' Daisukenojo echoed, totally ignoring her sudden impression of a statue. 'Strange!? We've been here for weeks! You've been all over the place! People are so used to you buzzing around that they don't even stare anymore!' He gestured at her up and down to emphasize how very odd-look-worthy she was.
"Sullen it is," Yamada said with relish.
'Hey! Like hell. She's eaten everything here! I wanna go and get some goddamn food!' Daisukenojo protested.
Raiku coughed self-consciously. 'I'm a growing girl,' she mumbled.
'Growing is right, you're a billion feet tall and fifty elbows worth of pointy—'
'What the hell are you guys arguing about?' Ryuu grumbled, sinking into the chair next to her.
'Don't get comfy. You guys are eating on the move,' Yamada said, pushing his plate away and settling back in his chair.
Ryuu slowly turned to glare at Raiku.
She held her hands up. 'Hey! Why do you assume it's my fault?!'
'Is it?' he asked.
Raiku's averted gaze apparently was enough of a yes for him to start growling.
'So what, exactly, are we doing?' Ryuu asked waspishly, and she could tell how annoyed he was by the sharp sound of his heels hitting the stone pathway. He only made noise when he wanted people to know their doom was coming, presumably so he would feed off their terror. It was night and it should, by all rights, have been cooler, but the humidity was sticking around even as lights began to appear in the houses they passed, rectangles of yellow light cast ahead on their path.
'Toaster's apparently gonna look helpless until they feel bad for us and come out,' Daisukenojo answered from where he was walking on the left of stone walls lining their path. They were old, bracketed with ivy and every now and again, one careless step would send a smaller piece of stone onto the road. If she looked up, the thick, slow-moving clouds would sometimes let enough moonlight through to light a point in the sky, but the night was otherwise muggy, thick and the darkness almost complete but for the houses.
It was all very picturesque. Raiku frowned, the quiet of it all starting to make her suspicious.
'But really,' Ryuu said, after a period of silence made it clear he wasn't getting a more serious answer.
Raiku shrugged helplessly, keeping her eyes cast up at the sky, hands in her pockets. 'Apparently there's a rumor,' she began, knowing her obvious reluctance would solve a lot of this for her, 'that people in my family can sometimes have good luck finding people.'
'Your family is good at weirding people out and staring blankly, and that's about it,' Ryuu said, ruthlessly blunt.
Raiku struggled not to blush, ducking her head. 'Thank you,' she mumbled, bashful.
'God you're weird,' Daisukenojo snorted, but he fortunately sounded more affectionate than anything else. 'I'm gonna go score some takoyaki.'
'Get me some as well, asshole!' Ryuu yelled after him just as the redhead leapt out of view.
As Daisukenojo's almost inaudible expletive faded into nothing, Raiku realized too late what the dark streets and the heat were doing.
Ambience.
They settled into silence, Ryuu thinking of something that was probably unpleasant for others and Raiku fuming at her slip-up. How could she have missed that? It was so ominous or… something else that was definitely not applicable, and she'd just whoops! Blitzed right through it! Like Yamada wanted all three of them out, where they could cause trouble with three times the efficiency! Like hell if she was going to let this slide.
She eyed the ground. She had to be wary. This sort of atmosphere, with this lighting, with their profession and demographic? They were prime Plot-bait.
Oh, a Plot would spring up, alright. She just had to snipe the sucker before it latched on.
'Hey. Hey. I'm talking to you,' Ryuu snapped.
She huffed. 'Inevitably.'
'What was that?!'
Raiku jerked back from where she'd been leaning towards a suspicious shadow—nothing but a startled-looking black cat. 'What?'
Ryuu rolled his eyes. He looked tired, she realized. Even fresh out of a shower, damp but somehow free from the floral scent, he seemed slightly bleary-eyed.
Raiku wondered if violets could be scared of people. If they could, would that apply to their extract? Had he somehow terrified the smell away? Wait, was that the only soap left? Would she have to smell like Daisukenojo, or had he brought that soap in-
Ryuu snapped his fingers. 'Focus!'
'What, what?!' Raiku skittered to the side slightly, getting some distance between them as they kept walking forward.
Ryuu exhaled sharply but closed his mouth, eyes fixed ahead. Now that he had her attention, in true Ryuu fashion, he didn't seem to want it. Of course.
'They aren't here,' he said eventually, aggressively, like he was daring her to question such an incomprehensibly random statement.
'I know,' she said carefully. 'We… you guys haven't found them.' Her foot snagged on a rough stone and she squawked, lurching forward before she caught her balance. When she finally got her composure back, the moonlight coming in through the clouds was a little brighter, the still air faintly scented with some faint floral smell.
Well played, Genematrix, she thought grimly. If her flailing hadn't killed the ambience, it really was playing to win.
Therefore, the sharp smack to the side of her head took her totally by surprise.
'The assholes from before!' Ryuu snapped. 'Those people!'
'Who?!' she demanded, scrambling backwards to get up the high stone wall, ignoring the ivy getting caught in her clothes. When she was a safe distance from the ground and steady atop the wall, she crouched. Ready to flee.
Ryuu glared at her. His eyes were very yellow and looking down at him from above made his features seem even sharper. She'd noticed on the tree, but this was getting out of hand and because she was so on top of this, she'd already thought of a solution if it were ever to happen again. There was only one thing to do.
Raiku tilted her head to the side.
It made the scar on his eyebrow make his face seem asymmetrical. Squinty, maybe. Gairano had discovered that Genematrix machinations often failed when the viewer looked ridiculous, which they excelled at.
Raiku in particular.
There. That done, she could finally spare a thought to what he was actually saying.
'Those people,' she repeated. 'Those…'
People.
Guilt struck her like Ryuu ordinarily would have physically. She blanched. 'Oh your,' family family family family, 'not… family,' she finished lamely, almost cross-eyed with the effort of not saying the opposite. 'Biological… not-family.'
Ryuu's irritated exhale hissed out of him, mostly because he'd never found another verb he liked better. He looked up at her with a sort of defiant anger, like he was daring her to judge him for bringing it up.
'And that's… good,' Raiku guessed carefully, eyeing him to see if this was correct.
He scowled.
'That's… bad?' she corrected, uncertainly.
His scowl deepened. Any second now the wind would pick up and then she'd be shoved off the wall by it. A high, distraught whine burst out of her before she could restrain it. 'What do you want from me?!'
'Admit you were wrong!' he demanded, but something was off. His arms were folded and he seemed oddly… something. Something not pure anger, and she would know; it had been directed at her enough.
'Well… maybe they got the message? Your messages? Angry, angry messages?'
Oh god; a sliver of teeth was showing, a clear sign of aggression. 'I haven't sent them shit!'
'Exactly! Maybe they… gave up?' Gave up. It resonated for a moment, and in an uncharacteristic moment of understanding, she realized why he was so strange, why such mixed signals were coming through.
Oh.
Maybe his family had given up on him.
Against her will and better judgment, she could feel her expression softening with no real direction from her.
Oh.
She could almost feel Ryuu's rage spiking, or maybe that was the sudden presence of a breeze for the first time in weeks, but it was then, because of course it was then, that she spotted the first Plot she'd seen in almost as long. It was thin, so thin it looked almost like a particularly long and weirdly oily piece of string until the light caught it and it seemed to move—
Not move, she realized. The light was moving and just passing over where it was stretched out, which gave it the illusion of…
Vanishing.
Ryuu was saying something in clipped and angry tones but there was a ringing in Raiku's ears that drowned him out, the high scream of sheer indignation at Genematrix machinations that came from deep within her Gairano DNA, from the stretch and strain of the very fiber of her being.
That.
Mother.
Fucker.
Raiku scrambled off the wall and dashed forward, shoving past Ryuu in hot pursuit of the slippery little fucker. 'What the fuck!?' his call echoed behind her, but she didn't have time to write a will or listen to her impending doom because she was going to smite this motherfucker.
It was disappearing as she moved but it wasn't moving, oh no; it was hiding, burying itself in the narrative potential weave of the world, reducing its vulnerability and its visibility all at one.
She ripped off a glove as her sprint took her skidding around a corner, hand clapping down on stone a scant second after the Plot sunk down beneath it. 'Come on,' she hissed, the momentum carrying her too far forward and forcing her to spring off the opposite wall to keep up. It was disappearing faster and faster, hurtling around corners almost as fast as she was but she was catching up, she was not going to be outrun by some slimy little—
Raiku really only registered the bar when she'd burst already in through the doors. The sudden shocked silence and the yellow lighting stunned her for a moment, a blow to her sudden laser focus.
Raiku swallowed, every muscle suddenly tense. She didn't even bother trying to fight down the blush; she just thanked god the mask was hiding it.
Her bare hand suddenly felt conspicuously naked, skin itching with sudden paranoia.
The various civilians gathered stared at her. She couldn't help but notice most of them were older men, which she felt was an unfair stereotype.
Then again, the Genematrix had put a fair bit of energy into sneakiness, so it was probably worn out.
She could still see it at the bottom of her vision, coiled around the bottom of a chair leg. Taunting her. She could hardly just storm up to the table, stamp her foot and run—
Wait. Wait, could she do that?
Raiku shook her head. No, no, that would be ridiculous even for her. Luckily, it appeared some semblance of continuity was on her side.
'What the hell was that?!' Ryuu demanded, appearing behind her and forcing her to spin around and dart a few steps back. His sudden appearance did nothing to ease the tension in the air, but did give Raiku a chance to slowly inch backwards towards where she remembered the stupid thing being. Especially as it just looked like she was backing way from his continuous derision.
Wow, she thought, eyeing how his hair was starting to get more sharply stylized; he was really worked up.
Meanwhile, Raiku shifted her weight backwards, one heel pushing towards the thread slowly, the slow pressure silent on hardwood.
She just needed to get an impression of it, she rationalized. She'd thought it was gone and that was weird enough. It was thin enough that getting it right would be tricky, the thing weak enough that she could step into it before realizing.
She risked another glance and it was miles off, this was going to take forever if she didn't want it to be obvious and she was going to have to
A floorboard creaked.
seehowtheyshallIyouthinkyouseehowtheyyouthinkshall I tell you
You think you're safe,
Teeth.
She can see them in the dark and in the redbright light flickering over skin, over the curve of that mouth. Teeth. Sharp and white and so terribly perfect and she can feel hardwood under her feet and palms and she can feel no such thing, nothing there but heat and rage and the pressure of another heart against her chest where her ribs expand against pain. Teeth. Sharp and white and so perfect,
because I can't touch you.
Oh, Raiku.
A sigh, indulgent and a knife of a smile where there should just have been the sound of a scream and the smell of burning flesh because nobody touched her, nobody—
There is no safe from me.
a storyyouthinkyou'reshallI
There was an unbearable pressure building inside her skin, the spaces between bone and ligament pulling and stretching and expanding until it
snapped
and
She exploded out of the sway of it just as something hit the front of her chest hard and she was moving backwards, feet leaving the ground and the world spinning and there was a noise, impossibly loud and there was yelling and
'Easy!' Daisukenojo's voice sliced through the din. 'Raiku, easy! Everything's fine! Calm down!'
Raiku tried to suck in a breath but it wasn't enough, all her air gone, gasping like a fish left on the riverbank on her back, staring up at the dark sky. The stars were swimming, her ears were ringing and the pressure in the air was built up like there was a thunderstorm no one could see but her.
She could feel the stone vibrating underneath her back, moving but not moving, the potential for moving if something or Something demanded it and she…
She had a very bad feeling.
'What the hell was that—'
'It's nothing, she's fine—'
Daisukenojo. Daisukenojo would help and she was on her feet again with the world spinning and
'—just out of nowhere—'
there was a meaty thud and a yell of pain and 'Raiku!' Daisukenojo snapped her out of her the lurch backwards, stomach clenching to stop the fall and curl her in on herself. 'What the hell!?'
'What?!' she gasped, reaching out a hand to his shoulder to steady herself, hurt when he jumped backwards.
'Are you trying to kill me!?' He wasn't afraid but he was annoyed, maybe concerned and god it was so hard to read faces sometimes, when her head was pounding like this.
'Hello?!' he gestured up and down and wow that was a lot of people behind him, and all of them looked either drunk or angry or both, drungry, if you will—her spirally thought-ramble was cut off by another flailing gesture.
Raiku looked down at herself reflexively and oh god. 'Oh god!' she shrieked, curling around herself and wrapping her arms around her stomach like that would hide the fact she was glowing white and sending sparks everywhere, what was she thinking it wasn't like she was trying to hide the fact that she was naked or something!
'That's not helping!' Ryuu accused from somewhere near the front of the small crowd (mob) and a particularly antsy man stepped forward just for a tanned hand to grip him by the ear and yank backwards, Ryuu briefly appearing between people as the world's worst possible crowd control.
'Just… do something! Fix it!' Daisukenojo suggested, helpful as ever.
'I'm not a broken radio!' Raiku exclaimed, voice shrill.
'You'll be broken in a second!' An unknowingly suicidal drunk shoved Ryuu, another in the small group of jostling bodies and Ryuu slowly turned, incredulous with homicidal mania. To protect herself legally and to help with concentration or whatever, she closed her eyes.
What was that, Raiku, she demanded of herself, closing her eyes and trying to calm herself down.
As she did, the roar of noise settled into an equally unsettling yelling, mostly male voices all raised in anger or alarm.
Right. They were among civilians, she rationalized to herself as the crackle-hum started to retreat from the surface of her skin. Not exactly normal.
Or polite, even in Konoha. A giddy, disbelieving laugh almost escaped before another pained yelp reminded her Ryuu's limited experience with non-fatal interaction.
There was a
thinkyou'resafethereisnosafethereisnosafethereisnosafe
Raiku recoiled but it followed, a wave of narrative pressure pushing in on her temples, on her throat, on her hands where they were shaking, voices and images and it was happening, it was happening and going to happen and to have happened and it was someone's certainty that
there
is
no
safe
from
me
you'rejustsoquietIdon'twantyoutodieshallIbaremyteethforyouseehowtheyrunseehowtheyrunseehowseehowseehow
The sound of the crowd's collective voice rose sharply in pitch, fuel added to fire in the narrative black swarming in the air so thickly that she couldn't breathe anymore.
Daisukenojo cursed, hands twitching towards his weapon pouch while Raiku gagged, trying to pull herself up into a standing position under the impossible weight, heat starting to rush through her system again at the feeling of dangerdangerdanger
There was a sudden drop in pressure; Raiku gasped, suddenly too light after the tidal wave, the air too clear and sharp in her lungs, everything colored with clarity painful for the contrast.
She felt sick.
She felt sick.
It felt like she was bleeding when she wasn't, it felt like there was some pain both in her head and somewhere in front of her, the pain of something being where it shouldn't and where she could see it and she knew she had to but she didn't want to—
Raiku dragged her head up, eyes watering with the effort of keeping them open when she wanted so desperately, instinctively, to keep them closed.
The small crowd was no longer unsettled and had moved to aggressive, and there was a hole in the world standing in front of them, oil-black and painful and impossible for her to keep her eyes on for long, human-shaped but nothing like it, Plots wrapped around each other in a gross caricature of a person and it had to die. It had to die it had to die it had to die—
'Gairano!' it snapped in a voice that was thousands of voices, shouting and screaming and sobbing and it was snarling, black curling around perfect white, perfectly sharp teeth in a face made of oil and flashes of other people's lives wrapped around, sliding over each other.
'Ryuu!' Daisukenojo shoved its shoulder. 'You're just freaking her out! Get her out of here so I can do some goddamn damage control!'
Seehowtheyseehowtheyseehowthey
see
Raiku opened her mouth and closed it again, over and over, trying to summon words, to scream, to do something and all that came out was
'Ryuu?'
It rolled its eyes, black orbs in a face that light escaped from with the shift of each black-slick muscle under a filmy sheet of narrative. 'No kidding. Let's go!'
how
Unable to do anything else, she stumbled after it because this was it, it had to die.
'Hey!' she yelled, shoving it violently in the shoulder and bringing her still bare hand up as it was forced to spin, clapping it to the side of its unprotected face.
they
It stared at her and Raiku stared back, paralyzed.
She stared back, her bare hand pressed against its bare face and she couldn't breathe, couldn't get air in through the sudden shock and the crash of denial. She could feel skin under her hand where she could see no such thing under the Plot, warm and smooth and the shift of it over fine bones when it opened its mouth to speak. 'What?' it asked, irritably.
Not for the first time that night, Raiku drew breath to speak and found she had nothing to say.
run.
A/N: DundunDUN.
